By Dave Brindle We’re in the middle of Pride season. The biggest of the top 10 festivals – Toronto, New York and San Francisco – are over now, but that leaves Montreal and Vancouver still to come in Canada, and a host of smaller ones around the world. They’re everywhere these days. Port Alberni, BC, will […]
Mukbang: Eat, shoot, get rich
By Jim Henshaw We’ve all had the (pleasure?) of having someone use Instagram, Twitter or Facebook to send us an image of what they’re about to have for lunch. Or dinner. Or breakfast. Or at 3:00 am after their local has closed and kicked them into the street. It’s an affliction I’ve never quite understood. […]
NationBuilder comes to Canada
By Alison@Creekside Ten years ago the Cons bought CIMS, their Constituent Information Management System, and began stuffing it with our phone numbers and adding smiley/frowny faces beside our names and whatever other info they could glean about us. The other parties had their own lesser versions. Most of us first took notice of CIMS when we […]
Programmed by Facebook
By Jim Henshaw This week the President of the CBC shared his vision of the future of our national broadcaster. It was a vague vision. Something about being leaner by thousands of jobs and less real estate, not overly committed to documentary projects or news and accessing audiences via social media and mobile instead of […]
Net fatality
A BoB Short A recent U.S. Federal Communication Commission (FCC) proposal that could have a significant impact on net neutrality in Canada as well as the United States has both users and big business up in arms. The proposal, slated for voting later this month, would bolster access to any website willing to pay the […]
Leaked docs throw new light on Fair Elections Act
By Alison@Creekside Last week, the Star published a half dozen articles based on secret memos and a 70-page slide show about the Cons’ 2015 election war room strategies, anonymously leaked to them, and as presented to the Conservative National Council (above) by Harper’s former dcomm and now executive director of the CPC, Dimitri Soudas: “Everything we do […]
Thank god nobody’s reading this
By Mark Leiren-Young Is anything private? A few weeks ago I was asked to fill out a survey from the Writer’s Union of Canada about “Spying and Harassment.” The union was asking writers whether living in a surveillance society was having an impact on their work. Years ago a friend was working on a TV […]
Microsoft: Team player
By Alison@Creekside Feel free to drop by this Microsoft ad and give it a thumbs down. “At Microsoft, your privacy is our priority.” Indeed. About that … Guardian: How Microsoft handed the NSA access to encrypted messages • Secret files show scale of Silicon Valley co-operation on Prism • Outlook.com encryption including Hotmail unlocked even before official launch • Skype worked […]
PRISM is just the beginning
By David@Sixthestate.net As you may have heard, the Obama administration has been outed as ambitiously Big Brother-ish, overseeing a National Security Agency surveillance program which essentially scoops user data from every major online source — Facebook, Google, Skype, even Apple — and puts it into the world’s largest personal information database. (This, surprisingly, means Facebook […]
Is Google making us less lituritt?
By Rachelle Stein-Wotten Today is Family Literacy Day in Canada, an initiative organized by ABC Life Literacy Canada, which encourages families to incorporate reading and other literacy-related activities into their daily routines. There’s no question that developing literacy in children is necessary and important. Adult literacy in Canada, however, doesn’t appear to be getting the […]
